Summary: An awakening by the population accompanies simple analysis of how patent-encumbered seeds can do more harm than good

THIS post will not deal with the Gates Foundation’s impact on the world’s food supply, which it helps monopolise using patents on life. For background information about that, see the links at the bottom of this post.

Glyn Moody has found this recent Frederick Kaufman post that explains why Gates’ investment in the evil company called Monsanto (one of the most notorious and corrupt giants out there) are the wrong way to supposedly address the problem of hunger.

Indeed, the dirty secret of world hunger is that the creation of a grain surplus is no solution. There is plenty of food on earth, more than double that needed to feed all 6.5 billion of us. The problem is not food availability, but price. People starve when the daily pay check doesn’t cover the daily bread.

All of which is not to say that small farmers do not need our help. But instead of installing futures markets and teaching the nuances of arbitrage, Bill Gates and the World Food Programme might consider expending their manifold resources on emergency income creation and employment programmes. Perhaps even more important, small farmers and landless peasants need to be supported in their efforts to gain political voice and power. As Amartya Sen has often pointed out, there has never been a famine in a representative democracy. A political voice is often the shortest path to a full stomach. Finally—strange as it may seem—the best early warning system for a hunger crisis is not a futures market but a free press. Rulers do not like to see their starving subjects on the front page.

Gates and the World Food Programme could spend their money to much better effect than on a programme like Purchase for Progress, because the totemic worship of liberal free market economics is not a reasonable solution to world hunger. And in this particular case, not being reasonable has fatal consequences.

This is perhaps another case where Gates helps monopolise the routes of operation for the benefit of a company that he also invests in. He does the same thing when it comes to medicine. To whit:

“The chief of malaria for the World Health Organization has complained that the growing dominance of malaria research by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation risks stifling a diversity of views among scientists and wiping out the world health agency’s policy-making function.

“In a memorandum, the malaria chief, Dr. Arata Kochi, complained to his boss, Dr. Margaret Chan, the director general of the W.H.O., that the foundation’s money, while crucial, could have “far-reaching, largely unintended consequences.”

“Many of the world’s leading malaria scientists are now “locked up in a ‘cartel’ with their own research funding being linked to those of others within the group,” Dr. Kochi wrote. Because “each has a vested interest to safeguard the work of the others,” he wrote, getting independent reviews of research proposals “is becoming increasingly difficult.”

“Also, he argued, the foundation’s determination to have its favored research used to guide the health organization’s recommendations “could have implicitly dangerous consequences on the policy-making process in world health.””

Looking at Monsanto again, they are creating artificial scarcity in genome and there is a new article in IEEE Spectrum titled “Genome as Commodity”. In a nutshell:

In a few years, millions will have purchased their own genome

That’s the type of thing Gates is promoting, whether he does so deliberately or not. He also makes money in the process of selfishly privatising genome (taking it from the people and then selling it back to people).

Vandana Shiva recently sued Monsanto with the government of India and according to this report, 100,000 Indians will fast against GMO.

On Martyrs’ day today, more than one lakh Indians observed a one-day fast to emphasise that the hard-won independence led by Mahatma Gandhi cannot be lost now to agri-business MNCs, with their technologies like GM seeds. Thousands who observed the one-day fast throughout the country sought to remember the Mahatma’s dream of Hind Swaraj and to uphold the food sovereignty of the country from the onslaught of technologies like GM seeds. “Remember the Mahatma, Stop Bt Brinjal and Protect India’s Seed & Food Sovereignty” was their message.

Why does the Gates Foundation try to impose on India something which it clearly does not want? Does it know better than the Indians what’s good for them (many Indian farmers reportedly commit suicide because of Monsanto)? Some have alleged that Gates, Rockefeller and Monsanto target Africa and India because they rely on corruptible governments where it’s easier to seed this GMO plague without resistance; Europe, by contrast, has assessed and rejected the threat repeatedly. █

The lunacy of the EPO with its patent maximalism will likely go unchecked (and uncorrected) if Battistelli gets his way and turns the EPO into another SIPO (Croatian in the human rights sense and Chinese in the quality sense)

Another long installment in a multi-part series about UPC at times of post-truth Battistelli-led EPO, which pays the media to repeat the lies and pretend that the UPC is inevitable so as to compel politicians to welcome it regardless of desirability and practicability

Implementing yet more of his terrible ideas and so-called 'reforms', Battistelli seems to be racing to the bottom of everything (patent quality, staff experience, labour rights, working conditions, access to justice etc.)

"Good for trolls" is a good way to sum up the Unitary Patent, which would give litigators plenty of business (defendants and plaintiffs, plus commissions on high claims of damages) if it ever became a reality

Microsoft's continued fascination with and participation in the effort to undermine Alice so as to make software patents, which the company uses to blackmail GNU/Linux vendors, widely acceptable and applicable again